Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-04-25/News from Wiki Education

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I am a physicist myself, and, while I never got a Nobel prize, I am recognized as the top expert in a couple of fields, and there is also a Wikipedia article about me. It is REALLY difficult to edit Wikipedia in your field of research, because (i) you are likely to be biased towards your own work; (ii) you are likely to come across the colleagues you know in real life (see multiple times per year on conferences, or even work at the same institution) who try to promote their own work, and you can not do anything about it because you may face real-life consequences - and I know pretty much everybody in the field. What is much easier is to do is to write something outside of my field, which I only know from textbooks. The ideal situation is when I need to study a new field and read textbooks - and this happens every few years. Even then, I had negative experience when I was in a situation where I had to fight with ignorant users not willing to have a scientific discussion at an appropriate level. It is so much easier to write about Russian railway stations, where I am likely the only person on the English Wikipedia in years to have access to sources and to have some general understanding of the subject.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:40, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ymblanter and Piotrus: The idea of Ph.D.'s as Wikipedia editors is somewhat contentious and I think a lot of people actually hide their academic qualifications around here. The reasoning is similar to YMB's above. If nobody recognizes it as being meaningful on-Wiki, why discuss it? It can even be a negative in editing I think that's changed slowly since we all started editing. I don't hide my Ph.D. but only mention it when it seems relevant, which has been about 4 times in 16 years. After trying a bit to edit in my area, I pretty much gave up after a year or two - it seemed like everybody in the editing discussions claimed to know more about the subject than I did! (1 or 2 might have!) I did have a couple of "fun" areas, that I never took too seriously in a research context, and still edit - in a very real world applied way - in those areas.

This state of affairs is changing e.g in last month's Signpost Research report, there was a study that said aprox. "30% of editors claim academic expertise in the areas they edit in", Piotrus had an article in the Times Education Supplement last month on the general topic, there are slowly developing academic journals under WMF sponsorship, and now 2 articles from WikiEdu in the last month (the other is about a senior UCLA psychologist mentioned in the Signpost's intro). Maybe it's time that Wiki PhD's start to discuss the matter of how to contribute with academic societies. I'd guess WikiEdu might even help. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:43, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ymblanter and Smallbones: I also wrote an academic article about Wikipedia and experts which will be published around the summer. Which I mention because I find Ymblanter's argument quite interesting, and despite that article being revised after discussion with several other academics familiar with Wikipedia, we didn't think of the example you make - that you avoid editing in topics you are an expert in due to issue (ii). Maybe I'll add it in and even quote you if there's still an opportunity to do so :) In fact, that article is supposed to be a part of a polemic with academics. Would any of you be interested in reading and possibly writing a comment that would be published in that journal? I don't know if the editor is still soliciting opinions, but hey, I can ask. Anyway, in my own experience, I haven't noticed anybody I know promoting their POV in the areas I am familiar with, but that's mostly because sadly in those areas (sociology, Polish history) there's pretty much no other academics. Well, in sociology we have a few people, but we almost never overlap. So I find it interesting that Ymblanter had a different experience. Which is the norm, I wonder? I think mine is more likely - as in, most areas on Wikipedia have next to no experts at all. Of course, there's MED and MILHIST, but they seem to be exceptions rather then the rule? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:45, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think there might be a difference between science on one side, and social sciences and humanities on the other side. In science, whereas knowledge dissemination outside academia is encouraged, it is not part of a job description. My main end product are articles in scientific journals (and the selection of journals is very narrow, up to now I published about 130 papers, and they all fit in about 10 journals). What we write is just not suitable for the general audience, and when we write articles, even when these are journals like Nature, we never seriously take a possibility that a person from the street would read them, at best a scientific journalist. (And btw this why open access is a non-issue: every person potentially interested in my articles has access to them, and if by any chance they are not in the office right now everything is also on arXiv.org). All this creates a very special communication style, which is hardly compatible with that of Wikipedia. In addition, of course, we have criteria which show what is correct and what is not. Whereas a lot of things are in a grey area (likely correct, and up to debate), we can not be in a situation when we have two contrasting opinions which both can be correct. This is why people are typically have zero tolerance to contrasting opinions, even though they might not have enough argument to base thei own opinion on.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:19, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The unfortunately late User:Paul Barlow showed one way of doing it. He was a professor of art history specializing in the Pre-Raphaelites (full-length biography of John Everett Millais etc), and on WP he had about 20-30 basic articles on his topic area that he had largely written and subsequently policed rather fiercely. But the great majority of his time on WP was spent on very different subjects, such as the Shakespeare authorship question, where he defended mainstream positions (again rather fiercely). A great loss. It would be nice to see a Nobel laureate writing on WP - so far I'm only aware of a Nobel wife doing so (if that's the term). In general my impression is that we have rather fewer (and older) "expert" contributors than in say 2005-10, when much of our better content was I think added by doctoral students & post-docs. In some ways this is the ideal career-stage for people to be editing. For the next generations of these WP was no longer "hot", and fewer edited. This was confirmed when I was Wikipedian in Residence at the Royal Society and later Cancer Research UK. Several of their top researchers in their 40s had edited WP in the past & were enthusiastic about encouraging their teams to do so, but the teams themselves weren't so interested. Johnbod (talk) 13:46, 28 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Sure we have Nobel Prize winners editing Wikipedia, see User:Brian Josephson for example, but I am not sure his contribution is net positive.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:11, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Johnbod: The last part, about teams not being interested, is IMHO highly relevant to my argument in THE - academics don't publish in Wikipedia, because they get no financial or career incentives. Acadamia is not the worst rat race out there, but we still need to publish or perish. And publishing in Wikipedia counts for squat, unlike publishing in predatory journal or paywalled encyclopedia nobody reads - both of those can give you some points if you are luckily. Contributing here will get you zip. Ditto for the Noble winners, with the added note that while those don't need to fear perishing, they probably are too old to seriously realize that in this day and age, to promote their findings they should write something online - they are still living, and quite happily at that, in the 'books and journals' world, ignoring the fact that the average person, particularly younger, stops at Wikipedia and doesnt' bother with their bestselling (if at all) books, and certainly doesn't have access to their paywalled artices in the walled garden that is academic publishing. If they think about popularizing their stuff at all, they'll be content with writeups they get in Science, Nature or traditional media (NYT, whatever). The argument about Wikipedia being 'too old to be cool' for youngest scholars is interesting, and I wonder if it would be possible to design some study to test this hypothesis. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:12, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Piotrus: I think you may be interested in checking out WikiJournals. Its creation is to address the gap that you highlighted between academia (the need to have a stable, citable record) and Wikipedia (the need of expert contribution) OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:47, 23 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I recommend any high-tier academic professional against joining/contributing to wikipedia. There are too many white males here already. Your energy is better used elsewhere. 2601:602:9200:1310:9D7E:8EB2:518B:1AAF (talk) 09:41, 27 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]